Michelle Schimmel

‘Polarization’ has become the master concept for diagnosing our current democratic crisis. But this is not polarization. It is the radicalization of the political right. By misdiagnosing it, we risk becoming complicit in the crisis. 🧵 Just out in Perspectives on Politics doi.org/10.1017/S153...

Now out: our study on what citizens imagine their political opponents to be like in Brazil, the UK, Germany & Poland 💭 We use open-ended survey answers to show how political stereotypes often blur issues, groups, traits, voters and elites. Paper: doi.org/10.1177/0032... See thread for a summary 👇

Thrilled to report our study of Rogan’s audience is published! 2 datasets. 2 different years w range of socio-demog, political, trust-oriented, & epistemic predictors. (Also: Working w @stecula.bsky.social @prowag.bsky.social & @dvshah.bsky.social was stupid fun) www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Very pleased to have been on the leadership team for this paper! LLMs are already being used all over behavioural science. But it is often pretty hard to work out exactly what has been done, and therefore how much confidence to place in the results. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

📄 New paper: people choose AI models partly on political grounds This is joint work with @pettertornberg.com @chrisbail.bsky.social @michelleschimmel.bsky.social and led by @michaelheseltine.bsky.social

Hi. Not really sure how to promote this story...but it is about AI and the overwhelming feeling of it bleeding into everything with no concrete articulation for what a good version of that future looks like. It's about feeling like every 8th person is living on another planet. Hope you'll read it

Knife crime! Pronouns! Meat bans! Some political issues lead to "hotter", more emotional and polarizing debates than others. We show how these "trigger points" reveal a contested structure of moral expectations and how they get weaponized by polarization entrepreneurs. OA @bjsociology.bsky.social 🧵

New in Nature: LLMs give "the party line" in the languages of authoritarian regimes. This works when they control the media, which feeds pretraining data. We show more state control over the media means less critical LLMs. 6 studies spanning 38 languages & 13 models. Details ↓

LLMs have been widely reported as left-wing biased. The finding has shaped policy and debate — with Trump banning "Woke AI". Our new paper challenges this story. It's not that the models are biased. It's that they think the auditor is. 🧵 w/ michelleschimmel.bsky.social‬arxiv.org/pdf/2604.27633

That's a wrap on #COMPTEXT2026! Huge thanks to lead organiser @chrisguarnold.bsky.social and IDAI/@unibirmingham.bsky.social team, plus all tutors, chairs, discussants & sponsors. Conference dinner at a world-renowned cricket stadium—what a treat. Safe travels home; see you at COMPTEXT 2027!

Like Grok and Attie, more and more social media platforms now integrate AI directly in online conversations. But how do these AI bots actually impact political discourse? We ran a series of experiments to find out. (Spoiler: the news are not altogether great.) osf.io/preprints/so...

Grateful and happy my Master‘s thesis work – with fantastic supervision from @fhopp.bsky.social – received a Top Student Paper award from @icacm.bsky.social at ICA! :))